Morgan v. Virginia

In July of 1944, 11 years before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a city bus in Montgomery, Alabama, a young woman named Irene Morgan rejected that same demand on an interstate bus headed to Maryland from Gloucester, Virginia. Recovering from a miscarriage and already sitting far in the back, she defied the driver's order to surrender her seat to a white couple. For her actions, like Parks, Morgan was arrested. Eventually, her action caught the attention of lawyers of the NAACP, in which her case, led by Thurgood Marshall and William Hastie, reached the Supreme Court in two years. Once in court, instead of seeking a judgement on humanitarian grounds or the equal protection provisions of the 14th Amendment, they argued that interstate travel violated the Constitution's Interstate Commerce Clause. On June 3, 1946, that strategy paid off. The court ruled in Mrs. Morgan's favor, stating that segregation in interstate was indeed unconstitutional. Though that decision was now law, the southern states refused it and Jim Crow continued as the way of life in the South.

Gaines v. Canada

Gaines v. Canada was the NAACPs first true accomplishment int he legal campaign. Lloyd Gaines brought the fact that Missouri State University would not admitt him into the institution because of the color of his skin to the attention of Thurgood Marshall and Charles Hamilton Houston. The case went to the state courts of Missouri, but was denied because of previous laws being passed. "The state of Missouri provides seperate schools and universities for blacks and whites." It later went to the Supreme Court. There, it was argued on November 9, 1938 and a decision was reached on December 12, 1938. The Supreme Court chose in favor of Gaines, holding that denying an individual admission into an institution was in violation of the 14th Amendment.

Smith v. Allwright

The white primary ended in 1944 because of the Supreme Court ruling in the Smith v. Allwright case. The white primary restricted blacks from entering into the Democratic Political Party. The success of this case was a huge victory for the NAACP legal campaign and many more would follow.

Overview

In 1909, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, NAACP, began to fight the legal battle for social justice for African-Americans under the leadership of Charles Hamilton Houston and his student Thurgood Marshall.
In 1896, the U.S. Supreme Court decided upon the "seperate but equal" principle in Plessy v. Ferguson. However, in the 1930s, Nathan Margold conducted a study and found that under segregation, the facilities for blacks were seperate, but never equal. Margold argued that this violated the equality issue spoken about in Plessy's principle. For this reason, Margold proposed a series of lawsuits that would challenge the system. After Houston was appointed to be the first Special Counsel of the NAACP in 1935, he refined Margold's strategies and came up with a battle plan that would later become known as the "equalization strategy".
Houston's equalization strategy filed a series of lawsuits demanding that black facilities be made equal to those for white students. Houston hypothesized that the segregated states could not afford to maintain black schools that were equal to the reserved, white schools.
From 1935 to 1940, Houston argued and won several cases such as Murray v. Maryland(1936) and Gaines v. Canada(1938) with the equalization strategy.
Rightfully, Thurgood Marshall succeeded Houston as the NAACP Special Counsel and continued the legal campaign with cases such as Smith v. Allwright, Morgan v. Virginia, Shelley v. Kraemer, Sweatt v. Painter, and McLaurin v. Oklahoma. Although there were several historic cases, none were as big as Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. In Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court decided that segregation in public education violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. This case served as a catalyst for the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 60s, which led to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Fair Housing Act of 1968.